Tim, Telstra, and the tech takeover of the NHS

Tim Kelsey’s legacy to the NHS isn’t just the botched care.data project. He’s also been pushing a vision of digital salvation, that his new firm is already starting to benefit from.

Tim
Kelsey, the NHS’s man for all things data and digital, has had it in the neck a
lot recently. Could this be why he is off to Australia to work for
telecommunications giant, Telstra (more on them below)?

As
the driving force behind the expensive, error-strewn care.data programme,
Kelsey was always going to be a controversial figure. People are rightly
concerned that this vast database of all our medical records, which was sold as
benefitting the health service, would also be of huge commercial value to pharmaceutical
companies, private health insurers and others.

A
2014 paper by Kelsey’s old employer McKinsey adds weight to the idea that the
intention was always to commercialise our data. The paper reveals that one
of the ambitions for care.data is to create “Product lines of data insight
available to “customers’”. “Is there a
product and a matching customer,” it asks, and “what are they interested in knowing?”

Like
many huge NHS IT projects before it, care.data has now been given a ‘red light’
by the government’s major projects oversight body - meaning its successful
delivery appears to be ‘unachievable’.
The Health and Social Care Information Centre recently raised serious
objections over care.data, too.

But,
the legacy Kelsey has bequeathed to the NHS goes much, much broader than
care.data.

He
has also been a very busy man at NHS England, where he is one of only eight
National Directors running the NHS.

Kelsey
has been creating a consumer market for digital health services and products in
the NHS. Things like ‘digital primary care services’ is what is going to take
the strain off the NHS, he tells us.
There are now, for example, ‘kitemarked’ apps that are designed to help
patients manage health conditions. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is fully
supportive, regularly proselytising about ‘21st century healthcare’ that will
be ‘personalised’, ‘digital’, ‘transparent’, ‘24/7’, and ‘in the right place’.

What
does this actually mean? Take the latest innovation from Ali Parsa (the man who
gave us Hinchingbrooke).
His NHS-accredited venture Babylon Health, plans to launch an artificial
intelligence powered diagnosis tool for consumers to use on their i-Phones
within a month. It is predicted to
fail to diagnose accurately and could increase the workload of GPs. Serious concerns
are being raised (in the US at least), about the value and safety of such
tools. The hugely lucrative market mobile health services has been dubbed a ‘Wild
West’.

It
was not Kelsey’s job to heed such warnings, however. His role has been to build
the UK’s market for digital health products and explicitly ‘drive
growth for the UK’.

In
this, he has been helped by his partner’s communication’s firm, ZPB. ZPB are
well-connected – they partner the elite Cambridge Health Network (set up by
McKinsey director to ‘network’ elite NHS leaders with the private sector). They
work closely with Kelsey’s old firm Dr Foster – editing their ‘Good Hospital
Guide’, and using their data to promote the idea of ‘virtual wards’
in conjunction with private firms like ‘Healthcare at Home’.

In
2013 ZPB was commissioned by NHS England to help organise and run events to
‘stimulate the market’ in health technologies in the UK, at which Kelsey
spoke. The NHS told us (in response to
our Freedom of Information request) that ZPB was hired by NHS England’s
‘strategic systems and technology directorate’, although ZPB’s Alex Kafetz, wrote
that the firm had been ‘commissioned by the NHS England patients and
information directorate’ - which Kelsey heads.

Telstra
is Australia’s equivalent of BT and the country’s third biggest company. Like
BT, it wants a slice of the huge global healthcare market. According to The Australian Telstra has ambitions to
turn its health business into a ‘serious revenue generator’, and a ‘billion-dollar-a-year
business’. For example, a piece of ‘thought leadership’ published in 2012
with KPMG, described how Telstra is ‘harnessing its innovative capabilities to
bring telehealth to the wider community.’

Telstra
launched its healthcare division, Telstra Health, in spring 2013 to tap into
the telehealth/eHealth market – think digital patient records, online
prescribing, and ‘healthcare at home’ via phone, internet, ‘apps’ and other
gadgets. It’s potentially hugely lucrative – the
eHealth market is predicted to reach $26 billion globally by 2017. At the helm is Shane Solomon, former head of health at KPMG Australia.

Britnell
wrote: ‘I shall let [Tim Kelsey] know that it would be worth a meeting given
the importance of Telstra and their focus on healthcare.’ He copied in then NHS
chief executive, David Nicholson to check his availability.

Kelsey
met with Telstra the following week.

By
December of that year, Telstra had secured the rights to provide Dr Foster
products and services in Australia.

Fast
forward a year to January 2015 and Kelsey was back meeting with Telstra to talk
‘data services’. In the NHS? In Australia? Who knows.

A
month later, NHS England announced the nine ‘consortia’ of approved ‘commissioning
services’ suppliers - who will from now on determine how and where a huge chunk
of the NHS’s budget will be spent.

Telstra,
through its acquisition of Dr Foster, had just entered the NHS market.

A
few weeks later, Kelsey jetted off to Australia to discuss all things digital
with leading Australian investors Mooroolbark
Group, private hospital group UnitingCare Health, and his old employer,
McKinsey. He also took part in a Health Roundtable of (mystery) attendees to
discuss data and technology policy; attended Australia 3.0, which appears to be
about ‘driving the innovation agenda’ to help Australia’s business compete;
as well as ‘Code
for Australia’.

It
is not clear who has benefited more from these and other meetings: the NHS,
Telstra, or Kelsey.

In
May he was back down under discussing digital innovation with, you guessed it,
Telstra.

And
now, with the summer behind us, he is leaving the NHS to become Telstra’s
commercial director.

With Telstra now an
established supplier to the NHS, some might see it as a reward.

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